What Are Memos & Splits and How Do I Add Them?

Splits and Memos are an important part of campaign finance, especially when it comes to compliance reports. Not having the correct data entry can cause non-compliant reports, as well as cause confusion with financial totals in ISP.

A Memo is a shadow version of a transaction with no actual financial impact. Memos are standalone transactions. While they may be related to another transfer, they are not part of it. A common example would be Redesignations and donated legal services, which are not considered Inkind contributions.

Neither Memos nor Splits have any impact on cash or net worth.

At the bottom of the transaction is a Splits section. Click the Specify Splits button to add a Split. You’ll then receive fields for Entity, Date, and more. If you are creating an Expense for a donation made to another committee, the general rule when it comes to which Election is to use the same election for the memo as was used for the parent Election above.

If you want to delete a transaction with Splits, you must delete the Splits first before you can delete the transaction as a whole. Using the Hotdog menu on the whole transaction, you can remove a split from its parent. This allows you to easily separate a split from the whole, creating an independent transaction without deleting the original.

If the Split is dated before the election and the Whole is dated after the election, the Split will pull with the Whole after the election if the Whole is itemized.

When adding many splits to a parent transaction, using the Save and Add Another button can save you time by making sure that you save each line as it is entered. If you are entering a large number of splits, if you do not choose to save between split entries, an interruption in your browser session can cause your changes to be unsaved. We highly recommend using the Save and Add option when manually entering many splits.

Create the transaction the standard way. The option to mark the transaction as a Memo will be at the top and labeled Is Memo.

Sort Order

When viewing a transaction with several splits or memos, the dependent transactions will be sorted first by Date, then by the Entity name on each split. In cases where there are multiple dependents with the same Date and Entity name, they will then be sorted by date that the split or memo was created.

What is a nested split?

A nested split is a split of a split. We do NOT recommend data entry that creates a nested split. This can cause calculation discrepancies and other issues, most notably on compliance reports.